Long Weekends Sri Lanka 2026 — Leave Planner

The planner reads the same gazetted holiday list that powers the Sri Lanka Public Holidays Calendar — the Annual Public, Bank and Mercantile Holidays Notification issued by the Ministry of Public Administration. There is no separate or guessed holiday list; both tools read one source of truth, so the dates always agree.

Every calculation is plain calendar date arithmetic, done in UTC to avoid timezone drift, in five deterministic steps:

1. Load the holiday set. For your chosen classification (Public, Bank or Mercantile) and year, the tool collects the gazetted holiday dates. Switching the set matters: Mahasivarathri, for example, is a public and mercantile holiday in 2026 but not a bank holiday.
2. Map the year day by day. Each of the 365 days is marked off if it is one of your selected weekend days or a holiday, otherwise work.
3. Find free long weekends. The tool scans for the longest unbroken runs of off-days. A run of three or more days that includes at least one holiday is a long weekend — a plain Saturday plus Sunday does not count. These cost zero leave.
4. Find leave hacks. For every block of consecutive workdays no longer than your max bridge gap that sits between two off-periods, the tool simulates taking those days as leave. The merged break runs from the start of the off-period before to the end of the off-period after. It records the leave cost, the resulting total days off, and the efficiency ratio: efficiency = days off ÷ leave days. Only bridges whose merged break contains a holiday are kept.
5. Build the optimal plan. Leave hacks are sorted by efficiency, highest first. The tool then greedily selects non-overlapping breaks until your leave budget runs out. Greedy selection is optimal here because the breaks are disjoint date ranges competing for a single pool of leave days; ties break to the earliest date.

The three worked examples below are computed by hand and re-checked against the live algorithm on every build, so the headline claim — three leave days for nine days off over the New Year — is verified, not marketing. Movable Islamic feast dates carry the dataset's standard ±1-day moon-sighting caveat.

• Ministry of Public Administration — Annual Public, Bank & Mercantile Holidays Notification
• Holidays Act No. 29 of 1971 — Public / Bank / Mercantile classifications
• Central Bank of Sri Lanka — Bank Holidays (Monetary Law Act §19)
• Department of Labour — Shop & Office Employees Act (mercantile basis)

The holiday dataset behind this planner was last cross-checked against the gazette on 2026-06-22. It is reviewed whenever the Ministry of Public Administration publishes a new annual notification.